Shadowveil: Legend of the Five Rings review – A pretty auto-battler lacking in synergy

Legend of the Five Rings’ video game debut was a highly anticipated one for fans of the setting. Mixing fantasy elements with the culture and history of feudal Japan, the IP has found fans from all over the world across different product lines, be it novels or tabletop RPGs. More than many other brands, Legend of the Five Rings presents itself in a consistent aesthetic, no matter which medium we’re talking about. It has this beautiful, inky art style to it that immediately evokes the images of katanas and yukatas and the sounds of a shamisen playing in your head.

Shadowveil: Legend of the Five Rings is no exception in this regard. From character art to the various environments in the game, everything is stylistically consistent and pretty, down to the final stroke of the brush. The thick, black ink coating the overland map until you explore further ahead is especially thematic. Unfortunately, these beautiful paintings lose splendor once things begin moving around, as the animations are nowhere near as refined. Still, in combination with some surprisingly excellent voice acting, Shadowveil is presented extremely well.

Not since Darkest Dungeon have I been so engaged by a roguelike’s presentation.

Delving beyond the pretty surface, Shadowveil is a game trying to wear many hats: It is an RPG built on the roguelike deck-builder foundations so common today, with all the elements that entails. You have a little hub area where meta progression happens and then go on expeditions into those misty, inky shadow lands, which present you with several paths to take. The different nodes come with various rewards, allowing you to equip your characters with ability cards and items as you advance. Successful or not, such expeditions net you resources to feed into the hub town’s progression systems, completing the very typical gameplay loop of the genre.

Shadowveil tries to differentiate itself by putting more of a focus on the narrative elements, such as by having a quest board with different missions and giving you a variety of goals for your runs. This is desperately needed, because otherwise the game feels a lot more stagnant than its peers. There is little in terms of enemy and encounter variety, and the meta progression – which ensures that your characters grow much stronger over time – completely trivializes the start of each run. In the same vein, the difficulty spikes massively towards the end and does so quite suddenly instead of gradually.

Although you can upgrade cards and items throughout a run and gain a variety of buffs through resting, your characters can only be leveled up in the hub town, putting the title’s RPG-inspired progression and narrative structure (you always go through the same acts) at odds with its core roguelike gameplay.

While the genre-typical elements of having to adapt on the fly and using what you’re given are still there, a completely successful run essentially comes down to grinding the progression — I didn’t get the feeling that I could beat the game simply by putting together a godlike build like in Hades or Slay the Spire. Naturally, this incentivizes you to always use the same characters on every run, again taking away variety. Runs also lose their lustre once you realize that you’re simply not strong enough to win them yet. Dead characters simply recover back home without any consequence.

Individually, all of the game’s systems feel very robust. There is a good deal of customization you can do with all the character classes and level-up options, such as boosting stats, getting new traits, or unlocking additional item slots. A solid amount of card variety exists and getting duplicates of a card with the same rarity allows you to upgrade them from common up towards legendary rarity, greatly increasing their effectiveness. Different item components can be fused to create different items and it’s quite fun to experiment with.

But all of these mechanics are somewhat at odds with each other, because the game is trying too many things at once that are contradictory. A roguelike should never feel stagnant or give incentives for doing the same thing over and over. Varied goals are fine and well, but they don’t provide enough variation to make up for its lack in so many other areas — this is a roguelike with clearly defined limits. That’s great if you wish to complete and never touch it again, but that’s the opposite of why people generally like this genre.

Combat is automated in this game. You deploy your characters on a grid-based map, choosing the best possible formation for the given terrain and your line-up. Special areas on the map are thriving with spiritual energy, providing power-ups to units starting the battle on them, adding a bit more tactical depth in addition to the deployable traps and other active abilities some units can gain access to. Once the battle has started, there is nothing you can do but cheer on your squad. Like the other systems, this is rock-solid on its own, though aspects like lacking enemy variety, a scarcity of impactful terrain elements, and the trivialization of early encounters suck out some of the fun.

On the technical side, developer Palindrome Interactive has some polishing work to do as well. For what the game is, loading times are too long even on high-end systems. Bugs aren’t doing the game any favors either, such as the HP bar of bosses vanishing and leaving you to look at the battle without any indication of how things are going. The UI is a bit clunky in general, such as not allowing you to check on your cards when choosing which character to award more ability slots to, or tooltips for those fields of power on battle maps not showing up if you haven’t ‘refreshed’ your cursor by randomly clicking on a character card first.

Shadowveil has the makings of something thoroughly enjoyable, but is hurt by a lack of polish and of a clear direction. It feels like the team wanted to make two different games, but had to glue them together, leading to lots of awkward mechanical contradictions under the pretty ink — it’s a testament to the individual systems’ strength that the game is quite fun regardless.

Score: 7/10

Platform tested: PC